Editor’s note: In this tribute to renowned scholar, singer, and activist Bernice Johnson Reagon (October 4, 1942–July 16, 2024), former Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage staff members James Early and Amy Horowitz share her collaborations with the Center and her legacy across the Smithsonian.
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“Maybe it is to the culture of women that we should turn to for a deeper understanding of the skills needed to develop and maintain research and educational programs in Black American Culture that effectively negotiate the range between the larger dominant community.”
—Bernice Johnson Reagon
As extended family and Smithsonian colleagues who worked closely with Bernice Johnson Reagon, we received a request from current staff at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage to offer, during Women’s History Month, reflections on her decades-long association with the Center and across the Smithsonian. Bernice saw women’s issues as a fundamental, but not exclusive, part of the larger tapestry of human identity, culture, and social justice. In her 1983 essay Coalition Politics: Turning the Century, she counseled:
Watch those mono-issue people. They ain’t gonna do you no good. Watch these groups that can only deal with one thing at a time… You must believe that believing in human beings in balance with the environment and the universe is a good thing.
Later in life, she shared this in a personal exchange:
Interesting that I never identify with “Lesbianism or woman/only” .... It has been important to me to be Bernice, sister, mother, daughter, artist, fighter for justice... sister to [James] Early...
Bernice Johnson Reagon, renowned civil rights activist, “songtalker,” playwright, composer, cultural historian, Smithsonian administrator, Roadwork co-founder, and DC Black Repertory Company music director (a role that seeded her founding the acclaimed a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock), began her work with the Smithsonian in 1969.
At the time, she was a student at Spelman College, a historically Black women’s educational institution, and co-founder of the Harambe Singers, a Black women’s ensemble based in Atlanta. Smithsonian Folklife Festival co-founder Ralph Rinzler approached Bernice, seeking advice on how they could “reach out to the local [D.C.] community, which was largely African American” as they were concerned about “the absence of Black people among the National Mall museum visitors.”
Rinzler, who knew Bernice through the Newport Folk Festival and the Highlander School, also proposed that Bernice develop and curate a 1969 Festival concert, “Black Music through the Languages of the New World.” As she entered her association with the Smithsonian, she brought her social justice ethics and strategies, honed through her work on Black American community culture and her civil rights movement activism. She brought “the idea of creating a space, to humanize that space, to take over a conventional structure and transform the relationships between speaker and audience,” wrote Stephen Henderson, chair of the Morehouse College English Department and an early collaborator of Bernice’s.
In 1972, Bernice moved from Atlanta to D.C. for doctoral studies in Howard University’s History Department. She joined in collaboration with Rutgers University folklore PhD student and Folklife Festival assistant director Gerald Davis, who proposed the African Diaspora as a concept for the Festival’s U.S. Bicentennial commemoration in 1976. Along with scholars and students in African, Black American, and African Diaspora arts, culture, and history, she developed the unprecedented African Diaspora program (1973–1976), which she explained was “presented as a part of a world family of culture based in Africa and extending to the Caribbean and Latin America to the United States.”
Bernice played a pivotal role in the conceptual development of the African Diaspora program as a folklore field researcher and administrator. She successfully steered the project and staff through many obstacles of folklore, festival, and administrative practices that were not historically designed to facilitate Black American and other non-European American collegial and programmatic work.
Foundational to Bernice’s contributions was her deeply rooted commitment to convening community-based cultural practitioners and scholars, across disciplines, genres, and museological practice. Bernice saw the congregational practice that centers her work as an invitation to community-based people to actively participate, to give their voice, and to “come a long way to be together”—referencing a song that Bernice sang for many years to welcome Festival participants from around the world.
From administrator to curator, from performer to advisor, she synthesized her experiences in the congregational song tradition that is her family, community, and history into a practice and methodology that avoids compartmentalization.
Her life’s work was especially informed by church women, including her mother, who anchored her early research focus. She was self-constructed as a multidisciplinary individual. Her congregational practice was intersectional before this term formally emerged in academic disciplines and activist movements. She brought to her paradigm-challenging and transformative work at the Smithsonian a collaborative gift that encouraged multicultural, intergenerational, and cross-genre voicing.
Bernice was a coalition-creator and a guiding collegial resource who extended her congregational methodology to her day-to-day collaborative engagements, as many colleagues at the Center acknowledged, including current Festival director Sabrina Lynn Motley. She reflects on a pivotal meeting with Bernice early in her Smithsonian tenure:
A few months into my first year as Festival director, James Early arranged a meeting with Bernice to talk about the work—the deep work, not procurement packages and site plans. He asked her what advice she could give me in my new role. She took a breath, then said something about first needing to know about the world I inherited: what budget was I working with? How was the latest fight with NPS over “America’s front lawn” going? Were there any new Smithsonian policies compromising the Festival? What I really remember, though, was that pause.
Instead of rattling off a list of brilliant “if I were you’s” interspersed with disapprobation and despair for the Festival’s future, she simply took a breath and let it settle in the room. It was the first time—and, in truth, one of the only—that happened. In this breath, she demonstrated how meaningful insight comes from careful consideration of everything from the quotidian to the extraordinary. That breath was an act of service, a small, well-timed gesture of collegial generosity. Through chronic budget shortfalls, occasional shutdowns, and competing visions of what the Festival should be, this moment reappears as a reminder to breathe, hold onto its purpose, and remember, as Bernice said, “Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you. They’re supposed to help you discover who you are.”
In her roles at the Smithsonian and elsewhere, Bernice explored and set new paradigms by critiquing the existing limitations of Eurocentric perspectives about Black American life and culture. One of her most important contributions was her intellectual preparedness and her self-will as a Black woman to challenge limitations and errors in paradigms held and defended by recognized leaders in the field. One example is her work in defending and advancing, against great odds, the African Diaspora Bicentennial Folklife Festival program:
The Smithsonian had been counseled by leading folklorists that this model would not work with Black Americans because of the impact of slavery and the belief that the Africanisms in Black American culture were not strong enough to support a live presentation program. I made a case for an African Diaspora program based on participants from three continents. I said that if you give me as our geographical territory Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and North America, it can be done. There are also the scholars who took major risks — one, to raise the questions within the institution, and two, to work to create the space for the experiment.
She traced the trajectory of African Diaspora’s inception in 1972 in the Division of Performing Arts, through its transition in 1983 to the landmark Program in Black American Culture, which she founded and directed at the National Museum of American History:
The festival presentations were based on field research that explored contemporary and historical relationships between Black American performance and culture traditions and those emanating from African-Caribbean, African-Latin, and communities of the African continent… During the fall of 1976, the program was revised in order to focus in more detail on research and preservation within Black America. Program in Black American Culture projects have included Civil Rights Movement Culture, Black American Gospel Music Composers, Spirituals, and Blues.
She brought a history of deep field research and conceptual awareness into the Smithsonian from her lived familial and community experiences in Albany, Georgia, where she was born and raised, and she extended this knowledge into formal comparative research and documentation. Her astounding compositional talent and powerfully moving voice as a singer, which for many epitomized her, was always grounded in and informed by her deep social justice ethic as a research scholar, organizer, and producer of scholarly and public work that challenged disciplinary borders.
When Bernice left the Smithsonian to accept an endowed chair position in American University’s History Department, she chose Niani Kilkenny to succeed her as director of the newly renamed African American History Program. Kilkenny later reflected:
When Dr. Reagon founded the program, there was no space or place inside of that institution dedicated to the research, documentation, presentation, dissemination, and preservation of this nation’s African American history and culture. So, she created it—a transformative Black cultural/historical “saturated” oasis inside of the Smithsonian.
Her aim was to pull so much quality research and scholarship through her program’s portal prior to the turn of the twenty-first century so that Black history and culture, past and present, would be solidly entrenched inside of the Smithsonian. Dr. Reagon’s visionary, trailblazing concept and program accomplished all that she intended, particularly creating the expectation that, in fact, made way for the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.
While much has been written about Bernice as a major composer, founder of women’s musical ensembles, researcher, festival producer, scholar, and author, we draw attention to her less-explored integrative, collegial contributions. In her 1985 Smithsonian anthology, Black American Culture and Scholarship: Contemporary Issues, she demonstrates her lifelong work of uplifting others, specifically the writing of community scholars:
These papers raise a number of issues about the research, study, teaching, and the politics of the use of Black American culture. In addition to relating severe needs, and raising questions of directions and conflicts in values, most of these scholars are involved in the creation of models where these concerns are addressed in ways that enhance and increase the quality, utility, and integrity of scholarship. Crucial to this is a keen awareness of the necessary relationship between the academy and the culture, the need for enough change within larger establishment institutions to allow and support multicultural research and practice without the distortion that comes from a vision of society shaped by monofocal cultural bias.
Bernice was well aware of the tensions that she brought to her collegial interactions. Writing about a consultation with the TransAfrica Forum, a D.C.-based advocacy organization that aims to influence foreign policy, she reflected:
I was very specific with the producers and after a stumble they got that they had to specifically address each issue or question I posed. I did not ask unnecessary questions, but they would not have had them as things they would have attended to in the time I needed the answers. I get a reputation for this kind of pressing, but I don’t know how else to give myself a chance to serve.
Her service was also significant after the Smithsonian’s acquisition of the independent record label Folkways Records, founded in 1948 and incorporated as Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 1988. She had recorded her second LP, Folk Songs: The South, on Folkways, in 1965, at the age of nineteen. She followed in the social justice legacy of renowned women artists who had previously recorded on Folkways in the 1950s and ’60s, including Elizabeth Cotten, Ella Jenkins, and Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerard, among many others.
She served as a member of the new label’s advisory council and was advisor and performer for the Folkways at 50 celebration at Carnegie Hall in 1998. She was the conceptual producer of Folkways’ Wade in the Water series of African American sacred music traditions and producer and liner notes author for Voices of the Civil Rights Movement. She was advisor for the Smithsonian Folkways American Roots Collection and Kindness by Toshi Reagon, her daughter.
When Smithsonian Folkways acquired the Paredon Records label, Bernice’s 1975 recording Give Your Hands to Struggle was the first reissue. In the process of reviewing the reel-to-reel master tapes, an unreleased track surfaced: “We’ve Come a Long Way to Be Together.” In her liner notes, Bernice notes the significance of finding this “lost” recording. She also writes about how this recording, in which she overlaid her solo voice in multi-tracked harmonies for the first time, was instrumental in formulating the ensemble sound that she was developing for Sweet Honey in the Rock. She details writing the album:
My memory of the experience is one of reaching and finding access to the chorus that is always within me. It is a chorus of memory, singing I heard long before I was form, long before I was anything – anywhere. And through technology I was able to give it what songs need to live – I could give this heretofore inside chorus air to ride on.
I have worked with Amy Horowitz putting together this program of twelve songs with the idea of balancing my expression as a singer, as a composer of new songs, as a creator of strong harmonies, and as an articulator of musical statements about our determination to be free.
On the walls of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage are the portraits of a number of groundbreaking musical artists and folklorists whose ideas and actions provided a foundation for the Center’s work. Bernice Johnson Reagon is among them. The “Legacy Wall” was established to offer new generations an awareness of the precious legacy under their stewardship.
We remember and are guided by Bernice’s spirit. She drew upon traditional songs to offer us North Star road maps as we continue to carry on and forward: “If you don’t go, don’t hinder me. I am leaving this place. I would like company. If I have to travel alone, don’t get in my way.”
Amy Horowitz, PhD, is a longtime associate of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She served as curator for programs on Jerusalem and Czech Republic, acting and assistant director of Smithsonian Folkways, producer of the Folkways@50 Carnegie Hall concert, and supervisor and producer of the reissues of Give Your Hands to Struggle, Voices of the Civil Right Movement, Wade in the Water, and Kindness, among others.
James Early is the former director of Cultural Heritage Policy at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
Acknowledgements
All Bernice Johnson Reagon compositions cited are copyrighted: Songtalk Publishing Co.
References
Early, James and Horowitz, Amy, 2023: “Bernice Johnson Reagon-In Celebration of Her Eightieth Birthday (October 4, 1942): A Preliminary Inquiry and Invitation to New Generations of Activist Scholars for Further Research,” Journal of American Folklore 136(539) 2023; University of Illinois.
Reagon, Bernice Johnson (editor), 1985: Black American Culture and Scholarship: Contemporary Issues, Smithsonian Institution, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 2001: If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Song Tradition, University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books.
